Obama remains the narrow favourite in a tight race

Americans are within hours of choosing their next President after a tense and acrimonious election battle – assuming recounts in too close states and legal challenges don’t drag the process out for a few more weeks.

Whether Barack Obama – the narrow favourite – or his Republican challenger Mitt Romney prevails, the winner will inherit an economy struggling to pull itself out of a painfully slow economic recovery as it grapples with deep short and long term fiscal challenges.

He will also face a split Congress – Republicans will almost certainly retain control of the House and the Democrats their bare Senate majority – and an uphill battle to get his way as they confront the immediate problem of the January 1 fiscal cliff and a long term budget hole.

After an exhausting blitz of swing state rallies by both candidates, Barack Obama remains a narrow favourite to beat Republican Mitt Romney after polls drifted incrementally into the President’s column in the last week of the campaign.

But the race is tight enough – within the margin of error on most polls – for a big voter turnout effort by the Romney campaign or a weak one by the Obama campaign to bridge the gap, University of Akron political scientist John Green said.

Disputes over early voting irregulatories multiplied on polling day – mostly brought by Democrats – setting the stage for a wave of court actions that could delay the outcome of the election by several weeks if the contest comes down to a couple of key states.

Obama and Romney have outlined starkly different approaches to dealing with these and other problems – such as the declining skills and competitiveness of the American workforce – as they ended their campaigns with a blizzard of battleground state rallies over the past weeks.

Obama has promised a higher taxing, bigger government vision. He would spend more on education, skills and infrastructure to equip America’s workers for the jobs of the 21st Century, and do less to get to grips with long term budget problems than experts say is required.

Romney offers a smaller government, lower taxing approach. He promises to cut the cost of government and make it more efficient, and balance the budget within a decade – but tax experts say his numbers don’t add up.

Hundreds and possibly thousands of of voters in Pinellas County – a crucial district of the swing state of Florida -- received robocalls from local officials advising them they could vote up to 7pm Wednesday – a day late.

Lawyers for the Democratic Party settled one action after three South Florida counties agreed to allow more time for early voting. Voting rights advocates claimed officials in Pennsylvania asked Black voters for ID but not white voters, and voting machines malfunctioned in Ohio in the heavily Democratic citirs of Cleveland, Toledo and Dayton.

Republican Mitt Romney voted in Boston and stumped in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“I think people in Virginia understand how important this election is to the country and to themselves and to their families. And I think they voted for change last time. They didn’t get it. I think if they vote for change this time I’m going to win,” Mr Romney told a Virginia TV station. Barack Obama visited a field office on a foggy Chicago day to rally the volunteers and make last minute get-out-the-vote calls as the final day of polling got under way in the 2012 Presidential election.

The President took interviews with TV stations in crucial battleground states and played his traditional polling day basketball game in a private stadium with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, his former assistant Reggie Love and Chicago pals Mike Ramos and Marty Nesbitt.

Vice-President Joe Biden also made a surprise visit to Ohio. Romney’s Vice-Presidential running mate Paul Ryan voted and stumped in his home state of Wisconsin, where he’s also on the House ballot.

Obama led Romney in the Realclearpolitics averages in most of the key battleground state polls going into the decisive polling day and remained a narrow favorite to win a tight election on the strength of this advantage.

Whereas the President led the national poll average by a negligible 0.7 percentage points, he could point to leads of 2.9 points in bellwether Ohio, 4.2 points in neighbouring Wisconsin, 2.4 points in Iowa, 2 in new Hampshire and 1.5 in Colorado.

He also squeaked out a 0.3 point lead in Virginia, a state Romney needs – along with Ohio – to have a meaningful chance of claiming the White House.

Romney, who had led in Colorado and Virginia late last month, and almost pulled even in Ohio, could only boast leads of 1.5 points in Florida and 3 points in North Carolina among the battleground states that will almost certainly decide the election on Tuesday.

As a result the Irish betting website Intrade has Obama a two to one favourite. Nate Silver – the heavy number crunching poll analyst who writes the 538 blog in The New York Times – rated Obama a 92 per cent prospect.

Still, all these polling leads are within the margin of error – +- (subs ie plus or minus) 3 points for each candidate.

The preponderance of leads for Obama in the swing states and the advantage he has in the electoral college from states he can count on also makes traditional pundits increasingly confident that Obama will win the electoral college.

But political scientists as Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics are more cautious than number-crunchers like Silver.

“With a slight, unexpected lift provided by Hurricane Sandy, Mother Nature’s October surprise, President Barack Obama appears poised to win his second term,” Sabato said on Monday.

“This has been a roller-coaster campaign, though very tight ever since Romney dramatically outshone Obama in the first debate in Denver on October 3. Yet for a challenger to defeat an incumbent, the fates must be with the challenger again and again,” Sabato said.

“Who could have imagined that a Frankenstorm would act as a circuit-breaker on the Republican’s campaign, blowing Romney off center stage for three critical days in the campaign’s last week, while enabling Obama to dominate as presidential comforter-in-chief, assisted by his new bipartisan best friend, Gov. Chris Christie (Republican)?”

The Australian Financial Review

BY Ben Potter

Ben is a senior writer on national issues and competitiveness based in Melbourne.